Resine Preciuese
Sultan Pasha (2015)

Resine Precieux is a smooth, affable amber with a strangely attractive muffled ‘sound’. Despite the presence of asafetida – a pungent resin with onion and garlic aspects when smelled in the raw – this blend is noticeable for its gentleness. Although packed with seemingly every resin under the sun, it is neither smoky nor sharp. Instead, the overall texture is balmy, almost muted, as if the resins were glowing softly through a thin layer of white wax. This lends a ‘candlelit’ glow to the composition, making it tremendously easy to wear.

Resine Precieux feels honeyed but in a soft, light manner that avoids the cloying heft of the material itself. Imagine a slice of honeycomb, pale and waxen, its holes filled with resin, cacao, and caramel, backlit by a fat church candle. There is a deliciously dark, stewed fruit note in the background that is part plum, part dark cocoa – like the opening of Tobacco Vanille but less clovey. Far into its drydown, Resine Precieux begins to manifest the drier aspects of tobacco and labdanum, for an outcome not a million miles away from the ashy leather syrup of Rania J’s Ambre Loup. Resine Precieux’s smoked sea-salt finish is nigh on irresistible.

Big thumbs up on this one...some of Pasha's brews are a thrill to smell , but not necessarily wearable for me...this , on the other hand , I would love to wear often...an amber bomb of unparalleled beauty...we have a blend of resins that has a nice smoky qualty...i get that nice resin effect of being in an oil painting class that i also find in Bogue fragrances...as with all Sultan elixirs this continualy morphs and evolves through a never ending cornucopia of accords...not at all gourmand , but sometimes gives me this strange effect of being caramelly and chewy...might be due to the honey/beeswax combo...a little touch of incense...now , don't get me wrong...i absolutely love this , but i am dissapointed with one thing...i am a big time lover of animalic fragrances...this has 8 notes listed that can be considered animalic , yet i dont get much of an animalic feel...fragrance has more of a purr than a growl...still though...love it...

As this fragrance is a composition first worked out for Reve Narcotique, I nevertheless tried my very hardest to disregard RN when approaching Resine Precieux, and simply address this fragrance as it appears to me with little to no preconceptions. This fragrance does a lot of things for me, and in no way falls under the trap that a lot of resin oriented fragrances do of being either overtly vanillic and sweet or a relenting force of darkness through and through; don't get me wrong, there are elements of vanillic sweetness here, and it certainly can be dark and smoky, but it isn't centrally defined by either - for more often than not, they feel to be elements working on different levels of this fragrance, and as such never feel over-blended, but instead an impossibly large landscape, a stroll through which will entice and warm your soul with its own internal majesty.

To me this fragrance starts off smoky, warm, sweet, thick and syrupy, but also light and spicy. There's a wonderfully spicy note that pairs with the styrax from some unseen lower level - traveling on the wind with a dense woody frankincense and a strong cinnamon/vanillic tolu balsam while cumin tinged vanilla, tonka and tobacco swirl in a primordial stew in a crater in the ground right before your eyes. The ground at parts grips your shoes as you walk, coated with a crystallized honey, and off in the distance you can hear the calls and grunts of animals whose musk (mostly civet and castoreum) you catch trails of every once in a while as you venture forth.

The vanillic qualities throughout this fragrance are quite interesting and lean woody and dark, and seem to occur in between transitions from warm or honeyed facets to the more smokey or musky notes - throughout the fragrance there is a habitual woody quality that seems to permeate a lot of the variations on note combinations that come across your way traversing this wild environment, which seems to be usually fairly dense, but sweet and soft on the nose, as if roughing up the edges which the vanilla seems to have been smoothing over, to create a natural finish - the animallic qualities do a similar thing whereupon there is a living pulse generating fresh wafts of air, carrying with them notes that you thought had vanished altogether.

The honey is of interest here as well, as it is a note which shifts back and forth from being that, almost burnt, almost crystalized note, adding dimensions to the warm, ambered and woody elements, but it also shifts into beeswax territory as well, and draws on the civet, castoreum, hyrax and occasionally even the ambergris to add a chewy and musky air to the already more 'dangerous' elements to this fragrance. The tobacco is a note which carries for a longer duration through this fragrance than I thought it would, and similarly adds a chewy quality throughout that grabs hold of other notes procuring a similar quality, and takes you on a 'taste test' of all the various resins and animallic notes surrounding you, providing for you a natural encyclopedia of the new terrain you're traversing. The tonka is similarly chewy, but also joins with the honey to add a waxy quality to a few of the more resinous ingredients as well.

Overall this fragrance to me is a wonderful study of a lot what more resinous 'orientals' can do by really creating a foreign and exotic landscape of scent - which to me has always been one of the most delightful things fragrance can do, and indeed orientals have always been aimed at the creation of this 'exotic' aroma, but more often than not a lot of the 'orientals' that wind up hitting the market play things safe and synthetic, whereas here a lot of real animallics, precious resins (haha,) and tender spices have been used to transcend how one-dimensional a lot of these fragrances can get, and challenges the user to allow themselves to go on a journey with it, and one that never goes so far as to create anything unpleasant or outside of the ideas refracted in every element of this gorgeous oil!

8.5/10

YT: Jess AndWesH